Thursday, December 09, 2010

Factual Nabs $25 Million to Push Open Data : Tech News « [GigaOM]

Data as a service as a business (p.s. Google already acquired Metaweb, and thus owns Freebase)

While location is the focus for now, Factual plans on expanding to other verticals. It has previously been used by Newsweek to chart the high school rankings Demand Media has used it for its Livestrong index of doctors. Factual, however, will face plenty of competition in the data-as-service market from companies such as Freebase, Infochimps and Google, with its Google Squared product. In location, SimpleGeo is also a major player that just announced two free APIs offering informationon 13 million U.S. places.